TORST

Essay by Anna Farova. Interview by Karel Hvizdala.

Published by Candela Books.Photographs by Gordon Stettinius and Terry Brown. Introduction by Dr. Manuel Moore.

According to the artists, this collection of photographed hairstyles was not originally intended to be disseminated, as the first image was conceived as a one-off piece. Gordon Stettinius, then a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, had given his students an assignment to create an edition of 16 images, which were collated into portfolios. Stettinius, having always contributed to these class portfolios, decided to get a perm at a hair salon and then visit a commercial photography studio to get a studio portrait. Thus an accidental collaboration was born. Terry Brown was the studio photographer at Mangini Studio at the time, and she wound up with the task of delivering a traditional studio shoot. Brown has been delivering the goods since, recording each hairstyle that Stettinius has put together. Seven years and nearly 50 studio portraits later, this project has been gathered in this extraordinary and witty volume.

Published by Aperture.Text by Czeslaw Milosz. New commentary with Josef Koudelka, Robert Delpire.

About Exiles, Cornell Capa once wrote, “Koudelka’s unsentimental, stark, brooding, intensely human imagery reflects his own spirit, the very essence of an exile who is at home wherever his wandering body finds haven in the night.…” In this newly revised and expanded edition of the 1988 classic, which includes ten new images and a new commentary with Robert Delpire, Koudelka’s work once more forms a powerful document of the spiritual and physical state of exile. The sense of private mystery that fills these photographs--mostly taken during Koudelka’s many years of wandering through Europe and Great Britain since leaving his native Czechoslovakia in 1968--speaks of passion and reserve, of his rage to see. Solitary, moving, deeply felt and strangely disturbing, the images in Exiles suggest alienation, disconnection and love. Exiles evokes some of the most compelling and troubling themes of the twentieth century, while resonating with equal force in this current moment of profound migrations and transience.Josef Koudelka (born 1938) has published ten books of photographs, many of which focus on the relationship between man and the landscape, including Gypsies (1975; revised and enlarged edition in 2011), Exiles (1988), Black Triangle (1994), Invasion 68: Prague (2008) and Wall (2013). Significant exhibitions of his work have been held at The Museum of Modern Art and the International Center of Photography, both in New York; Hayward Gallery, London; and Palais de Tokyo, Paris. Koudelka is the recipient of the Medal of Merit awarded by the Czech Republic (2002) and numerous other awards. In 2012, he was named Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture. He is based in Paris and Prague.

Published by Aperture.Text by Ray Dolphin, Gilad Baram.

Josef Koudelka’s Wall comprises panoramic landscape photographs made from 2008–2012 in East Jerusalem, Hebron, Ramallah, Bethlehem and in various Israeli settlements along the route of the barrier separating Israel and Palestine. Whereas Israel calls it the “security fence,” Palestinians call it the “apartheid wall,” and groups like Human Rights Watch use the term “separation barrier,” Koudelka’s project is metaphorical in nature--focused on the wall as a human fissure in the natural landscape. Sometimes blocks of concrete define the panoramas; at other times displaced olive trees--a lifeline for one man, collateral damage in another’s claim for territory--subtly emerge. As in his Black Triangle project, made in the Bohemian foothills of the Ore Mountains in the early 1990s, Wall conveys the fraught relationships between man and nature and between closely related cultures. A chronology, lexicon and captions provide context for the photographs. The book is designed by Xavier Barral, working closely with Koudelka. Wall is part of a larger project, This Place, initiated by photographer Frederic Brenner. This Place explores Israel as place and metaphor through the eyes of 12 acclaimed photographers, who were invited to look beyond dominant political narratives and to explore the complexity of the place--not to judge, but to question and to reveal.In 1968, Josef Koudelka (born 1938) photographed the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia, publishing these images under the initials P.P. (Prague Photographer). Koudelka left Czechoslovakia in 1970, became stateless, was then granted political asylum in England, and shortly thereafter joined Magnum Photos. Prior to Wall, Koudelka published ten books of photographs focusing on the relationship between contemporary man and the landscape, including Gypsies (1975), Exiles (1988), Black Triangle (1994) and Invasion 68: Prague (2008). Significant exhibitions of his work have been held at The Museum of Modern Art, New York and the International Center of Photography, New York. In 2012, Koudelka was named Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture.

Published by Aperture.Text by Will Guy.

Aperture's new edition of Koudelka: Gypsies rekindles the energy and astonishment of this foundational body of work by master photographer Josef Koudelka (born 1938). Lavishly printed in a unique quadratone mix by artisanal printer Gerhard Steidl, it offers an expanded look at Cikáni (Czech for "gypsies" )--109 photographs of Roma society taken between 1962 and 1971 in then-Czechoslovakia (Bohemia, Moravia and Slovakia), Romania, Hungary, France and Spain. The design and edit for this volume revisits the artist's original intention for the work, and is based on a maquette originally prepared in 1968 by Koudelka and graphic designer Milan Kopriva. Koudelka intended to publish the work in Prague, but was forced to flee Czechoslovakia, landing eventually in Paris. In 1975, Robert Delpire, Aperture and Koudelka collaborated to publish Gitans, la fin du voyage (Gypsies, in the English-language edition), a selection of 60 photographs taken in various Roma settlements around East Slovakia. Gypsies includes more than 30 never-before-published images.

Published by Torst.

Torst's introduction to Josef Koudelka (born 1938) provides a selection from all the key phases of his work: his 1960s portraits of the gypsies of central Europe and the Balkans and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968; the travel photos of the 1970s and 1980s; and a concluding section of panoramas focused on industrialized landscapes.

Prague

In 1968, Josef Koudelka was a 30-year-old acclaimed theater photographer who had never made pictures of a news event. That all changed on the night of August 21, when Warsaw Pact tanks invaded the city of Prague, ending the short-lived political liberalization in Czechoslovakia that came to be known as the Prague Spring. Koudelka had returned home the day before from photographing gypsies in Romania. In the midst of the turmoil of the Soviet-led invasion, he took a series of photographs which were miraculously smuggled out of the country. A year after they reached New York, Magnum Photos distributed the images credited to "an unknown Czech photographer" to avoid reprisals. The intensity and significance of the images earned the still-anonymous photographer the Robert Capa Award. Sixteen years would pass before Koudelka could safely acknowledge authorship. Forty years after the invasion, this impressive monograph features nearly 250 of these searing images--most of them published here for the first time--personally selected by Koudelka from his extensive archive. Interspersed with the images are press and propaganda quotations from the time, also selected by Koudelka, alongside a text by three Czech historians. Though the images gathered in this remarkable publication document a specific historical event, their transformative quality still resonates.

Stark, impassioned, and singularly intense, the work of the itinerant and fiercely independent Czech photographer, Josef Koudelka, has received deserved acclaim over the past three decades for having made a uniquely significant contribution to the language of photography. This major new monograph presents the most comprehensive survey of Koudelka's work to date, bringing together more than 150 of his most eloquent images--from his earliest, many published here for the first time, to his most recent: mesmerizing studies of the European landscape made with a panoramic camera. Whether photographing Prague's avant-garde theater scene in the 1960s, the secretive world of the Eastern European gypsies, Czech resistance to the Soviet advance on Prague, or the environmental degradation of our postindustrial world, Koudelka has consistently produced transformative images that stand outside of time and place. In the words of the legendary French photography-world figure and Koudelka's longtime champion and publisher, Robert Delpire, "Koudelka brings an intense eye and full heart to each place, object, and person. This work proves once again that he is a photographer with unique personality and power." Beautifully produced with duotone printing and three gatefolds, this volume also contains eight original essays, each exploring a different aspect of Koudelka's work and illustrating the artist's constant evolution and intensity.

Published by Torst.Essay by Anna Farova. Interview by Karel Hvizdala.

Known for his higly formalized, sensitive images of the vestiges of gypsy life, Czech photographer Josef Koudelka has been traveling the world since 1962, documenting their communities in Eastern Europe, England, Ireland, France and Spain. Living as his subjects do, constantly on the move and defiantly independent, Koudelka has always refused magazine and commercial assignments, and has worked for years without a permanent darkroom. Focusing on the rituals of everyday life, on birth, marriage and death, he has produced years of work, including the cycles reproduced here: Theater, Gypsies, Prague 1968 (Invasion), Exiles and Chaos. These well-known series are complemented by lesser-known photographs from the 1950s. Included as well are an essay by Czech art historian Anna Farova, who has followed Koudelka throughout his career, and an extended interview with the artist conducted by Karel Hvizdala over a period of ten years.